


You and your words flooded my senses

by lisachan



Series: Leoverse [323]
Category: Glee
Genre: Angst, M/M, Phone Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-14
Updated: 2021-03-14
Packaged: 2021-03-22 16:20:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30041391
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lisachan/pseuds/lisachan
Summary: One day, while shopping for Christmas presents in Florence, Cody comes across an unexpected book - Leo's autobiography. He's disappointed when he learns Leo didn't even mention him in it, but after a more in-depth search he finds out he might not be in the memoir, but he certainly is everywhere else in Leo's bibliography.
Relationships: Original Male Character/Original Male Character
Series: Leoverse [323]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/30541
Collections: COWT - Clash Of the Writing Titans/Chronicles Of Words and Trials





	You and your words flooded my senses

**Author's Note:**

> **WARNING:** This story is a spin-off for Broken Heart Syndrome and is set within the series. This means that it depicts things happening way late in the 'verse, and that may be on varying degrees of spoiler.
> 
> This is unnecessarily dirty, but ok.

Cody’s Christmas shopping in the Florence city center when he sees the book on a stand in the window. It’s propped on one of those best-sold stands counting down from ten to one among the best sellers of the week, charts he never believed because he honestly always thought the publishers or the shop managers put the books there not in their proper best selling order but to try and push sales of a few specific titles. You feel more inclined to buy a book you know nothing about when you see it’s at the very top of that month’s top ten.

But this time it’s different. Despite the extreme and unusual December cold, which compels him to keep moving to the next shop on his shopping list – Gutteridge, to try and find something for Vince’s dad despite knowing no matter how much money he spends on his Christmas present the man will never look favorably at him – he stops in front of the bookstore window and just stares at the book sitting on the stand decorated with a huge number three. 

It’s titled “Broken Heart Syndrome – A memoir”, and it’s not the title that hits him, and at first it’s not even the name in top of it, because he doesn’t need to read it to know it’s Leo’s. His face printed on the cover – his sharp features, full lips, those curls, those piercing dark blue eyes – does the job by itself well enough.

He gets closer to the window, staring through the glass that turns white with his breath when he puffs against it. His gloved hand rests on it as he tries to form conscious thoughts in his mind.

He didn’t know Leo was a writer.

He didn’t know he had written a memoir.

He didn’t know his books had been published in Italy, or that he won a prize, as the red paper band wrapped around his book recites.

He swallows and heads towards the door, walking in the shop. It’s full of people flying from a bookshelf to the other, most of them wearing very concerned expressions on their faces. It’s incredible, he muses as he walks through the aisles headed for the essays section, how stressed up people get over buying books as presents. It should be the easiest option, if you really know someone, but people seem to only walk into a bookstore when they have _no idea_ what to buy a loved one, which is incomprehensible to him.

Cody distracts himself for a while, looking at the people, pretending he doesn’t remember how to find a book on a bookstore bookshelf. But then five minutes pass, and it’s almost lunchtime, and he needs to get to Gutteridge and then to the Disney Store before he can head back home, which will take forever with the usual traffic on the highway, and so he snaps out of it, and he heads for the letter K tag. 

He finds it right away, “Broken Heart Syndrome, a Memoir by Leonard Karofsky-Hummel”. There are five copies on the shelf, one with the cover facing the aisle, possibly it being the best working selling point of the whole operation. Leo’s face is still mesmerizing, even after all this time. He looks a little different than he looked in college, there’s a heaviness to his eyes that wasn’t there back then, and his features are somehow sharper. He looks like he lost a lot of weight and only recently managed to regain some. Cody has no idea how he manages to deduce so much with just a picture, and a heavily edited one, too, but he does. He _knows_ what he’s thinking is true.

He picks up the book and turns it around, reading the back cover. It’s Leo’s story in a nutshell, in a way Cody would’ve never told it. A troubled adolescent who didn’t know how to express himself and his feelings, his meeting with the man who would’ve taught him how. An honest recount of how and why his relationship with Blaine fell apart over the years, dragged down by the unbridgeable gap of their age difference, and then their miraculous reconnection. A couple sentences on how love doesn’t heal on its own but certainly helps.

Cody bites at his bottom lip. No trace of himself on this back cover. (As it should, a tiny, mean voice says in the back of his head.)

He opens the book and starts flipping through the pages, getting to the index at the end. There’s a whole chapter dedicated to “The College Years”, page 347 out of 682. He heads there feeling hopeful and expectant while at the same time trying to bring himself down. Don’t hope for anything, don’t expect anything. He hasn’t, during these last five years. Why should he start now?

And yet his heart is beating to a different rhythm, his thoughts are taking different paths. His whole organism is dancing to a tune he thought he had forgotten. The song of Cody and Leo, forbidden music he should never replay.

He gets to the chapter and starts reading through it. Leo’s honest on the page. He’s raw and rough in the description of his daily life, in confessing how he’d use random people to just have something to tell Blaine upon his return. He would have boyfriends and girlfriends in the gaps between Blaine’s permanence in his life, and then, when Blaine came to him, they would spend hours going through all of his adventures and one-night stands. And Leo would revel in knowing none of them meant anything, compared to Blaine. And Blaine would feel comfort in knowing he still had the power to turn his kid back towards himself, no matter how many beautiful boys and girls he ended up bedding in his absence.

Once again, though, no mention of him. Of the nine months they spent together. Of everything they shared, the time, the feelings, the life histories. No mention of how close they got, and how intense what they felt towards one another grew to be.

Perhaps because, he realizes looking at a page where Leo spent four whole paragraphs to describe a random girl he doesn’t even remember the name of, compared to the zero paragraphs he dedicated to him, that was not real. It was probably all in Cody’s head. There was no real closeness, no real intensity. No real love. Perhaps he has been mentioned in the book – he _is_ one of the random nameless boys Leo describes in The College Years. He seems to recall distractedly reading about some dark-haired petite boy on page 348. Perhaps that was him and that’s all he’s gonna get from this book, all Leo remembers about him.

He should leave this book. Put it back on the stand and forget about it. Ignore it even exists. Head straight to Gutteridge, buy a present for his husband’s father, then walk straight to the Disney Store to buy something for his own baby boy, and then run back home, climb on his mountain of a husband right where he stands, even out on the fields if that’s where he’s at, and ride him until he’s exhausted. That’s what he should do, that’s all Leo’s memory deserves, to be wiped out by the blinding pleasure of a wild outdoor orgasm drenched in the Tuscan countryside sunlight.

He keeps the book. Pays for it and puts it in his bag.

He quickly passes by Gutteridge and the Disney Store, buys what he had planned to buy, no feeling in it, and when he gets home he makes sure Vince is out working and will be doing that for a few more hours and he locks himself in his studio, sitting at his drawing table, reading through it twice in six hours, desperately trying to find any trace of himself he might have left in Leo’s life.

He finds none.

*

He doesn’t forget about the memoir – that would be impossible – but he stops obsessing over it after a week or so. He wonders if he should put it in the sitting room library because those are the books he never really looks at, the majority of them being in Italian and also Vince’s. That would be the perfect place for it, a forgotten place. But he ends up putting it on one of the hanging bookshelves he keeps in his studio, instead, and between two of his favorite books, too. He doesn’t know why, exactly. He loathes this book, he really does. But the place seems fitting, somehow. And it also makes it impossible for Vince to find out about it – Vince never really looks at the books Cody stores in his studio, they’re never his cup of tea anyway.

For a few days he doesn’t think about the fact that there might be other books by Leo out there. He doesn’t remember ever seeing one of his books in a bookstore, before, and therefore he’s pretty sure he has never had anything else published by an Italian publisher. He only starts wondering if there is anything else after a couple weeks, when he’s over the memoir enough that he can look at its spine without feeling physically sick to the point of wanting to throw up.

He makes a quick run at the local bookstore, but he finds nothing. So he makes another trip to the big one in the city center, but the shop assistant behind the computer screen informs him that the memoir is the only title they have available by Mr. Karofsky-Hummel in the shop.

So he resorts to the internet, something he had never done before – searching for Leo’s name – because he didn’t want to risk ending up on one of his social media channels, seeing more than he was prepared to see.

Surprisingly, though, there are a website and several social media pages, Facebook, Tumblr and the likes, but the first link that comes up is an Amazon shop page his USA publisher dedicated solely to him.

There are around fifteen titles on it, plus the memoir.

With his eyes wide open, shocked at the abundancy of stories he never even knew existed, Cody scrolls through the titles and learns that most of them, with the exception of a few short stories collections, belong to an ongoing series Leo’s been writing for the last three years, writing at superhuman speed, it appears.

The series is called Wicked Heroes, and it’s a Young Adult series. There’s a main character named Lasher who’s a boy in his sixteens who’s a so-called Hybrid, born from a magician and a regular man. In the first book of the series he meets with a man who’s twice his age, Dorian Fairborne, also known as the Beast of Lockameere, a man who hunts the streets of Goraya, the Dark Magic City where Lasher lives, wiping it off mad creatures imbued with dark magic known as the Plagues. There’s an attraction between the two, but the Beast refuses to give in to it. He gets closer, but then pushes Lasher away, and then leaves the city, to keep exterminating Plagues somewhere else. Cody goes through the summaries of the subsequent books, and as the story progresses Lasher comes in contact with new people, visits new cities and nations, learns a lot about the magic he possesses, but one thing never changes – the Beast of Lockameere comes back to him, they clash against one another, and then Fairborne always leaves, and Lasher gets left behind.

Cody stands up, slamming the top cover of his laptop closed. He’s trembling in rage – he can’t believe what he just read. Apparently, the memoir was just the tip of the iceberg. That first book in the series is five years old and ever since then Leo has been writing and rewriting his love story with Blaine, over and over again, under at least two different forms, because that’s the only thing that matters to him. That and nothing else.

At first he’s tempted to buy all the books in the series and then put them in a bin to make a symbolic bonfire out of them. He would light it out in the night and he would watch as the fire consumes covers and pages, turning them into ashes. The bastard even chose the most appropriate genre for his stupid love story retelling – the only genre Cody really reads. And what infuriates him the most is that if he had known nothing about the behind the scenes of that story, he would have bought that first book in the series without even thinking about it. That’s exactly he kind of book that he would’ve loved to read when he was a teenager, the kind of book that would have made an addict out of him.

He opens his laptop again and sits in front of it, staring at the page filled with books to buy. He stares and stares until his eyes start burning, and that’s when he notices that he’s been crying. The thought enrages him, and so he furiously wipes his tears off his face, and then buys the whole ten-volumes package at once. The new volume in the series is scheduled to come out in just a few months. He’s going to be up to date with it by the time it does.

*

Vince mocks him for days, when the books arrive and he literally starts doing nothing but reading all day. He lies down on the couch, or on the bed, on the swing in the garden, he even starts taking baths instead of showers so that he can keep reading when he’s in the bathroom too, and in the beginning it’s a horrible, extenuating experience. The first three to four books are a constant celebration of the relationship between Lasher and Dorian – and it is not a positive celebration, the relationship is seen in all its complexities and all the details that make it, at times, unhealthy and kind of creepy, but all through that one thing is obvious and clear as day, at all times, and that is that Dorian loves Lasher much more than he’s prepared to bear, and that’s why he’s struggling, and Lasher loves Dorian much more than he thought he would love anyone else but himself, and that’s why he’s obsessed by him.

And Cody reads through every book, page after page, crying silently in anger and frustration around every ten pages, insulting himself in the silence and privacy of his mind, telling himself what did you need this for, you idiot? Didn’t you know all this already? Didn’t you know already they exist only for one another? That you never meant a thing? That Leo only recognizes Blaine as his lover in his books because he was the only one he ever loved? Did you _really_ need to read about it over and over again, to replay these pages read in Leo’s voice, to reiterate the concept even further?

At the beginning of the sixth book, he’s about to give up. Leo writes well, his descriptions are evocative and turn the city tangible in Cody’s head, the worldbuilding is on point, very well-thought and egregiously crafted, the characters are interesting, their narrative paths compelling and God, the sex scenes, despite always toeing the safe line for obvious market targeting reasons, are damn hot, but it’s not worth the pain it causes him. If this one is the same as the previous ones, he tells himself as he half-lies at the bottom of his bath-tub, submerged with lavender-scented foam and with vanilla candles burning all around him, he’s going to give up and he’s going to sell the whole series back on eBay.

But something changes in this book. Lasher meets a character, the name’s Noah. He meets him in the city of New Porter, it’s been months since he last saw Dorian and he feels detached and angry with him. Noah’s what the people call an Aether Maiden, basically a sorcerer, though the title is usually held by women, who fights the Plagues through complex white magic incantations. He’s fully human, but there’s something about him that Lasher can’t quite get, something that gets him hooked to him right away.

Cody holds his breath for a second as he reads about Lasher and Noah’s first encounter. Lasher’s fighting a Plague with his dark magic enchanted knife after he shot all his arrows at it, and he’s losing. The Plague’s attacking him relentlessly, and Lasher’s wondering what’s the point of this, what’s the point in fighting and traveling and searching and putting his life constantly on the line if all he ever gets is struggle, and even when he does find Dorian, Dorian keeps eluding him in the end. And he’s about to voluntarily succumb to the Plague’s last attack, when Noah appears behind the monster in the back alley where Leo’s been trapped. He’s dressed in white and, in Leo’s writing, _his skin glows in the white lights of the streetlamps, turning transparent. He glows just like the moon, hypnotic and mesmerizing, he glows like magic, he glows like Lasher imagines salvation would glow if it appeared in human form, and Lasher can’t take his eyes off him._

Noah casts a blinding spell over the Plague, and while the monster is confused he literally pulverizes it using the most powerful white magic incantation Lasher has ever seen. Then he comes closer to Lasher, he helps him up and he takes him to a dirty motel in the heart of New Porter City. He blushes and he looks down and he blabbers embarrassedly as he excuses himself for the kind of place this is. He explains that there are not many safe houses around the city, but this place, dirty and filled with thieves and whores as it is, is one of them, because it’s under the protection of someone important. He tells him they can rest there. He tells him he can heal him.

Cody squirms a little as the rest of the scene progresses. The kind of healing Noah offers to Lasher is achieved through an empowered white magic ritual. As much as dark magic is fueled by hate and rage, white magic is fueled by love, and what is sex, Noah explains, if not love amplified?

Noah helps Lasher lie down on the bed. He crawls on top of him, then sits on his crotch, lifting his white robe. 

_His body is creamy white and perfectly smooth underneath, not a scar, not a stain on him. Lasher stares at him in awe, his eyes huge, his fingers trembling as he raises his hands to feel him. He has never touched anything that felt like Noah feels, he’s the opposite of Dorian. Where the man’s hard, this boy’s soft, where the man’s dirty, this boy’s clean. Everything of Dorian that is dark, Noah has it, but it’s pure. Lasher looks at him, hypnotized, as Noah starts chanting an incantation, moving slowly on top of him, rubbing down against his crotch. A surge of fire and hunger overcomes him and he wants him, he wants him so desperately he feels on the verge of asphyxia. As his body starts healing, white magic working on every fiber of his being, fixing what is broken, he wraps his rough hands around Noah’s delicate hips and overturns their positions, crushing him against the mattress. Noah, soft and pliable, whimpers and allows him, spreading his legs just enough to welcome him on himself, and when Lasher demands his lips Noah offers them willingly for the ravishing. Lasher dives in him, his tongue exploring every corner of the boy’s mouth, his attraction towards him mounting the stronger the incantation becomes, just like the incantation grows stronger the more Lasher wants him, in a cycle of power that just doesn’t end. “What did you do to me?” Lasher utters between hungry, furious kisses, as he tugs at Noah’s robes to push them aside, baring the bottom half of his body and forcing him to spread his legs wider. “Nothing,” Noah moans, liquid and tempting, and the word sounds to innocent that every fiber of Lasher’s being comes alive with the need to taint him. He wants to stain him permanently, he wants to break him open and leave a trace of blood inside this boy’s body, he wants to come all over him, leave him smelling of him for weeks after they’re done. He enters him with a strength that surprises him first, and Noah’s voice rises in a yell that drips pleasure and wanting, and Lasher disappears within him, and the world disappears around them. And he thinks of nothing else._

Cody whimpers weakly as his knees come apart the moment he squirts a little. He feels as though he just came back into himself after an out-of-body experience. He was fingering himself lazily underwater as he read and he didn’t even notice. Breathing out heavily, he puts the book down on the floor, where it’s safe and no water can spill on top of it, and he takes a few second to center himself, keeping his eyes closed.

That was him. He couldn’t say what exactly makes him so sure of it, but Noah is him. He recognizes himself in him, and even more in the way Leo writes about him. The words he uses and the way he composes sentences around him, that’s something Cody recognizes. His eyelashes tremble as the smallest smile curves the corners of his lips upwards, and he feels his eyes getting heavy with a few moved tears, but he does not cry them.

He reaches out for his phone, instead, as always resting face up on the corner of the tub. He scrolls through his WhatsApp contacts, but the last conversation he had with Leo is so old it doesn’t show up. He searches for it, then, and that’s when it appears again. He takes a look at his picture, first, there’s a horrible, wrinkled, bald chihuahua in it, and Leo’s petting it adoringly while the little monster shows him its belly. The smile on Leo’s face makes the Sun look like a black hole.

The last conversation they had was not even a conversation. Leo sent him a text, almost seven years ago. “Thinking of you,” the text said, “Sometimes it happens. Hope you’re well. Hope you have nice dreams. Call me if you want to.” Cody never did. He never even answered. 

He swallows, now, his fingers still resting, moving vaguely up and down every now and then, against his sensitized opening. 

“Creamy white and perfectly smooth, huh?” he writes, “And you never touched anything that felt like me.”

It takes literally ten seconds for Leo to visualize the message, as soon as it reaches him. Cody watches him type and erase and retype and erase again at least four times before sending something.

“How do you know? Have you been reading me?”

“I just got your whole series. I’ve been kinda binging it.”

“Nice. What do you think about it?”

“Derivative,” he answers, trying not to chuckle, even if he knows Leo can’t hear him, “And you look like you’ve been writing the same story for years. But this was the first time I was in it, and that feels nice.”

This time, it takes a little longer for Leo to answer. “I couldn’t speak about you before,” he writes, and his words, despite being just written, sound so honest Cody’s heart almost melts reading them, “I wasn’t ready. It hurt too much.”

“What hurt?”

“Remembering you and not having you.”

“And now that doesn’t hurt anymore?”

“On the contrary, it hurts even more. But I couldn’t stop myself any longer. Which book are you at?”

“Sexth.” He sends the text without reading, and then laughs at the typo, which he corrects. “Sorry. Sixth*.”

“Don’t worry, all of my fans call it like that. You’ll see as you keep reading. Plus, you’re in for a treat. Wait until you get to number nine.”

“Wow, I’m still around at number nine?”

“You’re still around at number twelve, Sweets.”

“But you only got ten out.”

“I know.”

Cody doesn’t even know how to answer to that. The warm wave that overcomes him would be answer enough, he guesses, if he could find a way to convey the idea to Leo. But he doesn’t manage. He just cups himself in his hand, his fingers well wrapped around both his dick and testicles, massaging them as he imagines Leo’s voice calling him using the nickname he had crafted for him back in college.

He’s about to say something – anything – just to end the conversation on a less intense note, but Leo’s faster than him. “Can I call you?”

“But… what time is it over there?”

“6 AM. Can I call you?”

“What were you even doing awake at 6 AM?”

“I wasn’t awake, I just woke up when your text arrived, I have no idea why. Cody, can I call you, please?”

He bites at his bottom lip, uncertain. He’s not sure he’s prepared to hear his voice for real. He’s not sure he ever could. But he says yes, and thirty seconds after Leo’s already calling him.

“Hello?” he says as he answers, and on the other end of the line, for a few seconds, everything remains perfectly silent and still. Leo seems unable to even breathe.

Then he lets go of a shaky breath, so intense Cody feels it on his skin, even if he’s half a world away. “God, it’s so good to hear your voice.”

“Yours too,” he concedes, sliding a little lower in the tub, hiding behind the foam as the water ripples around him.

Leo remains silent for another second, listening attentively. “Where are you?” he asks with open curiosity.

Cody blushes a little. “In the tub,” he admits, “I was having a bath.”

“God help me,” Leo whimpers, and Cody squeezes his eyes shut and tries not to breathe heavier if he thinks of the implication of that prayer and the way Leo’s voice sounds. “You were in the tub while you were reading that scene?”

“Mh-hm,” Cody nods. He thinks about it, but he can’t stop himself from adding a few words more. “It was… very hot. The way you described it. I— I _felt it_. A lot.”

“Jesus,” Leo whimpers again.

“I touched myself,” Cody adds in a haste, his breath getting labored, “I’m still— I’m still doing it.”

In the silence that follows, Cody hears a belt buckle get undone. Then Leo exhales deeply, while Cody pictures him shove his hand in his underpants. “What are you doing to yourself, Sweets?”

It took less than a minute of conversation to get to this point, and Cody has no idea how it happened. He knows Leo’s married, and his own husband is working in the fields around the house, and he knows perfectly well that this shouldn’t be happening, that he should take a step back and tell Leo no. But he wants this so much he’s sure he’ll lose his mind if he doesn’t get _something_ from him right now, whatever it is Leo’s prepared to throw at him. So he relaxes against the wall of the bath tub and parts his legs a little, slipping his middle finger inside himself.

“I’m masturbating…”

“Jerking off?”

“Uh-uh,” he shakes his head, “Fingering.”

“God, I wish I could see you.”

“I can’t even see myself. It’s happening underwater.”

“I have no idea how you resist the urge to look at yourself while you masturbate. You must look stunning while you do it. It feels dirty just to think about it.”

“Dirty good or dirty bad?”

“There’s no such thing as dirty bad,” Leo chuckles, and then inhales. “Two fingers?”

“One.”

“Then get to two.”

Cody licks his lips and closes his eyes for a second, breathing shakily. “Okay…” he nods, slipping his index finger inside too. He teases himself, his fingers moving swiftly in and out of his opening, stretching it. He gets in up to his knuckles, then pulls out, then all the way back in, curling them inside to try and reach his prostate, give himself a stronger shock of pleasure. “Mhn…” he moans enraptured, one of his legs emerging from the water as he hooks it over the edge of the tub to spread wider, “Feels good.”

“Yeah… It does,” Leo’s breath sounds heavier, and there’s a distant sound accompanying his words, skin slapping, wet and obscene. He’s masturbating too. “Three, now?”

“Nh— You want me wide open?” Cody throws his head back, his cock twitching underwater.

“Fuck yes,” Leo breathes out, the sounds becoming faster and just a little bit louder, “Stretch yourself for me, Sweets. Put another one in, let me hear how you like it.”

Cody moans deeply, trying not to get too loud. Luckily, the house is empty at this hour – Alex is in kindergarten, Vince is out working. “So big…” he mewls as he penetrates himself with three whole fingers. He swallows and meditates for a second if it would be appropriate to take this to the next level, but then he realizes that of course it wouldn’t, but clearly none of them cares. “You’re huge… and so hard.”

“Jesus Christ, baby…” Leo’s voice turns into a whine for a moment, but then he grunts and he presses the phone harder to his lips, speaking into the mic in such a hoarse whisper Cody feels him as though he were whispering straight into his ear. “You’re so fucking tight,” he says, “I’m gonna make you come so hard. I’m gonna fuck you so well you’re gonna scream.”

“Yes—” Cody moans louder, resting his head against the edge of the bathtub and pulling his other leg out of the water too, spreading them both as much as he can to finger-fuck himself with the same intense need he imagines Leo would use to fuck him, “Yes— Hn— Yes, make me come!”

“Yes, baby, don’t stop,” Leo keeps jerking himself off, the sound triggering Cody to the point he can’t even keep still. He shakes his ass uncontrollably on the bottom of the tub, he moves against his fingers as he would move against Leo’s hips to get him deeper into himself. His mind goes back to the scene he read between Leo’s characters, it mixes it with Leo’s voice, with what they’re doing right now, and as he comes with an exhausted, breathless yell, seconds later, he knows, he just _knows_ that he is never going to be able to pick any of those books up again without getting a raging hard-on.

He’s still shaking with the aftershocks of his orgasm when he realizes that Leo’s panting hard in his ear, and he’s muttering words that Cody will never be able to understand if he doesn’t listen to it. So he listens. “Jesus, I missed you so much, Sweets. God, it hurt so bad not to have you. I thought about you so many times, dreamt about you so many nights. You have no idea how obsessed I’ve been. You have no idea how much I want you. I’ll always want you, baby. I’ll always want you.”

He’s glad he listened.

*

“I just received it!” he texts Leo when, a few months later, the postman delivers in his arms the eleventh book in the series. The book’s not officially out, yet, but Leo snatched one of the early copies for him, and sent it right away. “I’ll start it in the afternoon.”

“Not right now?” Leo answers right away.

“Jesus, Leo, it’s gotta be 4 AM over there! SLEEP!”

“I couldn’t! The tracking warned me you should receive the parcel today and I couldn’t wait to hear from you.”

“Why are you even so excited?” Cody chuckles, typing fast with his thumb as he balances the parcel on his hip, walking upstairs, “Do I have something to look forward to?”

“Who knows,” Leo answers. And then, after a few seconds, he sends another text. “Just make sure you’re in the tub by the time you get to page 407.”

Cody laughs again, shaking his head. “You’re dirty,” he writes.

Three seconds later, Leo’s already calling him.

**Author's Note:**

> This story was written for the sicth week of COWT #11 @ landedifandom.net  
> Prompt: M3, this unbelievably beautiful quote from Hamilton, a show filled with unbelievably beautiful quotes, "You and your words flooded my senses, your sentences left me defenseless, you built me palaces out of paragraphs, you built cathedrals", which also contributed to find a title for the story. Thank you, LMM.


End file.
